[arch-general] A suggestion for the devs regarding rebuilds

[Allan McRae]

On 09/02/10 08:54, fons at kokkinizita.net wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 12:36:55AM +0200, Ionut Biru wrote:
>
>> you are focusing only on .so which is different but this schema will
>> work only if the package is split in lib, -dev, whatever as now, the
>> headers will conflict since it have the same name on the same
>> location.
>
> Not true. When a new version is installed, the
> headers are replaced, and the symlink from
> 'libfoo.so' is modified to the new version.
>
> In a link step you refer to the lib as '-lfoo'
> which gets translated (via that symlink) into
> 'libfoo.so.N', the newest installed version.
>
> If you have separate -dev and -lib packages
> (and Arch hasn't AFAICS) it is the package
> manager's job to always replace both in sync.
> Nothing magical about that, all distros I used
> before just did it that way.

I think you miss a point here.  After a rebuild NONE of the packages in 
the repos depend on the old library.  So there is no point in us 
packaging the old library for compatibilty, as none is needed.  We only 
support the latest packages in the repos, so if you have issues with old 
versions of packages or packages from unsupported sources, then it is up 
to you to fix them.

Allan